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Text translation in the context of
endangered language documentation: The case of Iquito∗
Christine Beier
cmbeier@gmail.com
April 23, 2015
Fieldwork Forum, UC Berkeley
1
Introduction
◦ This talk1 explores the realm of translating ‘texts’ of various types from Iquito, a highly
endangered language spoken in Peruvian Amazonia, into Spanish and English, in the context
of a long-term, community-oriented language documentation project, the Iquito Language
Documentation Project (ILDP).
◦ I will discuss some key assumptions, objectives, challenges, and strategies relevant to text
translation as part of endangered language documentation; and will examine some of their
impacts on project planning, work flow, and eventual tangible outcomes, illustrated with
specific examples from a text produced by ILDP team members.
◦ It is my goal to make a strong case for why the quality of our free translations matters; and
to offer some practical strategies for improving our work in this domain – both the ease of
doing the work, and the quality of the eventual output.
2
Background: The Iquito Language
◦ Iquito [iqu] – or, in the new official orthography, Ik´ıitu – is a member of the Zaparoan family.
It is one of the two Zaparoan languages still spoken; the other is Arabela, with ∼50 speakers.
The other two members of the family are S´apara, a.k.a. Z´aparo [zro] (nearly extinct); and
Katsak´
ati, a.k.a. Andoa [anb](extinct).
◦ Iquito is highly endangered; at present, ∼18 fluent speakers remain, all over 65 years of age.
◦ See the maps below for the approximate location of Iquito, which is primarily spoken in San
Antonio de Pintuyacu, Loreto, Peru (about 40 miles straight-line distance from Iquitos); as
well as the approximate locations where rememberers of S´apara and Katsak´ati now live.
∗
Many thanks to all of the ILDP team members with whom I have worked, and from whom I have learned, in the
course of our collaborations over the years. Special thanks to Lev Michael, Nora England, and Tony Woodbury for
their input over the years on matters related to the substance of this talk; and to Ema Llona Yareja, †Ligia Inuma
Inuma, Hermenegildo D´ıaz Cuyasa, and Jaime Pacaya Inuma for all that they have shared with me in, through,
and about the Iquito language. Last but not least, special thanks to Line Mikkelsen for a series of stimulating
conversations on this topic during the spring of 2015.
1
This manuscript is available at: www.cabeceras.org/beier translation fforum 20150423.pdf
1
◦ The segmental inventory of Iquito is relatively typical for Western Amazonia. The ten consonants (j, k, m, n, p, r, s, t, w, y) include no voiced obstruents; and the four vowel system
(a, i, i-, u) also demonstrates contrastive vowel length (aa, ii, i-i-, uu).
◦ Its prosodic system is a mixed stress-tone system with H and ∅ tones (represented thusly: a,
´
a, aa, ´
aa, a´
a, etc.).
◦ The orthography for Iquito/Ik´ıitu was changed by the Ministry of Education and made official
in September 2014. The official alphabet is: a, i, i-, j, k, m, n, p, r, s, t, u, w, y.
◦ Syllable structure in underived contexts is (C)V(V).
◦ Iquito exhibits nominative-accusative alignment and SVO basic constituent order. This basic
order is changed through a number of processes, including topicalization and focus fronting.
◦ Iquito verbs are exclusively suffixing; tense and aspect are obligatory categories.
◦ Much Iquito morphology is non-agglutinative, and involved changes in quantity or tone on
vowels adjacent to the segments associated with a given morpheme, or consonant mutation
in adjacent consonants.
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Background: The Iquito Language Documentation Project
◦ The ILDP was launched in 2002 as a team-based, community-directed documentation project.
◦ While Lev Michael and I were grad students at the University of Texas at Austin, he and I designed the ILDP, and collaborated with Dr. Nora England on its administration. The project
was funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP, www.eldp.net)
from 2003 through 2006 (Grant #MDP0042).
◦ Since its inception, the ILDP has included a total of 6 fluent speaker consultants; 4 community
linguists; and 15 visiting graduate student researchers, including 11 linguists and 1 ethnomusicologist from UT-Austin, and 3 Peruvian licenciatura-level linguists from the Universidad
Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima.
2
◦ Fieldwork on the ILDP has been done in 9 years so far: 2002 through 2006; 2008, 2009, 2014,
and 2015, primarily during the US academic summers; fieldwork has mostly been carried out
by a team, but a handful of solo trips have been made by licenciatura and doctoral students.
◦ As an endangered language documentation project, the ILDP is producing an encyclopedic
dictionary in both Iquito-to-Spanish and Iquito-to-English forms; a descriptive grammar;
a set of Iquito-Spanish educational materials for community use; and a wide-ranging text
corpus, to be published in forms useful and accessible to multiple audiences – primary among
them, of course, being linguists and community members, but also members of the broader
public, especially in Peru where attitudes (and prejudices) regarding the value of indigenous
languages has tremendous consequences for the longevity of those languages.
◦ Information on and products of the ILDP are available at: www.cabeceras.org/ildp home.htm
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Background: The ILDP text corpus
◦ The ILDP’s text corpus currently includes ∼170 audio-recorded ‘texts’, amounting to ∼35
hours of spoken Iquito.
◦ When I say ‘texts’ here, I mean audio (and video) recorded spontaneous streams of connected
speech (even if the content is memorized); which are typically monologic; and which narrate
an event or events, or otherwise relate or exchange ideas and information.
◦ So far about 100 of the 170 texts have been partially or fully transcribed.
◦ The recordings range from ∼1 minute to 75 minutes; and many, but not all, are accompanied
by video recordings.
◦ At present, the longest fully transcribed and translated text is Kaaya as´
aana, at 68 minutes
and 900 lines.
◦ Types of texts in the collection include:
traditional/shared narratives
historical narratives
personal narratives, reminiscences, and dream narratives
procedural descriptions
instructive descriptions and narratives
hortative discourse
ayahuasca chants
public political speeches
multi-party conversations
and even some gossip (ergo, generally not for public consumption)
◦ We produced a printed collection of 21 texts (2,372 lines) for the community in 2006, which
is available online at: www.cabeceras.org/ildp06 textos.html
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◦ We plan to publish a substantial portion of the text corpus in two versions at the end of
2016: one for a lay audience with Iquito, Spanish, (and sometimes English) free translations;
and another for linguists with Iquito, word- and morpheme-level breakdowns and glosses, and
English free translations.
◦ At that time, we also plan to publish Iquito-Spanish and Iquito-English versions of our dictionary.
◦ Taking a brief step out into the bigger picture, let me mention that I consider richly detailed,
engaging, and aesthetically pleasing texts and text artifacts to be indispensable tools for both
learning a language and learning about a language and culture, as well as for revalorizing them.
So a strong value of both content and form in text work runs through this entire discussion
for me.
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The need for a strong foundation in the theory and methods of
translation
◦ Within the next decade or two, the Iquito language will have no remaining native speakers.
And language revitalization efforts have born little fruit thus far – although the revalorization
of the language has been much more successful, both in San Antonio and regionally.
◦ Therefore, for our text corpus to be useful and accessible to the heritage language community,
it will have to be accessed through other languages, primarily Spanish. Whether the ILDP’s
texts are used as a cultural resource, as a political resource, and/or as a language-learning
resource, Spanish will soon become the gateway to Iquito.
◦ Therefore, I feel that the free translations and annotations provided in our published text
collection must have ‘good’, if not ‘excellent’, free translations into local Spanish; as well into
English when possible (both to broaden the general audience and to increase the prestige of
the text artifacts); and must include ample annotation to connect the local Spanish to more
standard varieties.
◦ Knowing that translation is a complex and context-sensitive enterprise, I have sought guidance
and insight from others who have undertaken careful translation work in the context of
language documentation.
◦ However, when I started digging around in the language documentation literature for discussions of the theory and methods of translation relevant to our work, I found astonishingly
little.
◦ It is my goal, therefore, to examine the disciplinary context surrounding this notable absence;
and then to provide some experience-based commentary and preliminary resources in order
to begin to fill that lacuna, both for my own self and for you.
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Disciplinary context
6.1
Rallying calls for comprehensive documentation
◦ In the programmatic literature on language documentation and documentary linguistics that
has emerged since the early 1990s, calls are repeatedly made for “the making and keeping
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of records of the world’s languages and their patterns of use” (Woodbury 2003) that are
“lasting,” “multipurpose” and “cover all registers” (Himmelman 2006: 1-2); that “provide a
comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community”
(Himmelman 1998); and which are produced through documentation projects in which “native
speakers are among the main players in determining the overall targets and outcomes of a
documentation project.” (Himmelman 2006: 16).
◦ In my personal experience in this field, it is now fairly widely accepted, at least at the
ideological level, that aspects of the use and circulation of language and discourse, as well
as its inseparability from culture, are part of what good language documentation work will
engage with.
◦ It is also fairly widely accepted that language documentation projects will engage with the
community of speakers and inheritors of the language, and take their desires, priorities, and
ethics very seriously.
◦ All of that discourse and ideology adds up to a clear mandate that we produce text artifacts
that are useful to and valued by the heritage language community. In my mind, this mandate
in turn demands that we produce and publish “good translations” of endangered language
material, and most especially those materials that convey endangered cultural knowledge and
endangered forms of verbal art.
◦ Another entire area of our practice that I must mention but won’t explore in great detail here
are the theory and methods necessary to represent aspects of the poetics and the performance
of verbal art in the context of language documentation; just a few relevant comments on this
are included below.
◦ As an aside, this discussion about translation in the context of text work intersects in important ways with the work of ‘glossing’, ‘translation’, and ‘exemplifying’ in dictionary writing
and grammar writing, but I won’t venture into those areas in this talk.
◦ To situate this constellation of issues in the intellectual history of language documentation
for a moment: because I was well-trained in the ‘discourse-centered approach’ to language
and culture at UT-Austin, which itself is deeply rooted in the Boasian tradition, I seem to be
far more sensitive to this set of issues than the average bear.
6.2
Insufficient disciplinary attention to the theory and methods necessary for
‘good translation’
◦ Creating a ‘good translation’ is variously considered by translators and translation theorists
to be a ‘science,’ a ‘craft’, a ‘skill’, and/or an ‘art’. I myself consider ‘good translation
work’ to be all of these things. The perspective that I have developed over time is that we
can deliberately learn the science and skills of translation in order to hone our craft and
eventually our artistry as translators of endangered languages and forms of expression.
◦ So, how can I learn to do translation well? By seeking out and working with time-tested and
field-tested theories and methods that are appropriate to the specific enterprise of translating
endangered language material for diverse audiences.
◦ Unfortunately, as I intimated a moment ago, most of the discussions of translation that I
found in the language documentation literature either:
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. . . said nothing at all about the substance of the issue, merely mentioning ‘translation’ as
something to be done;
. . . provided brief, largely un-theorized lists of ‘do’s and dont’s’;
. . . problematized the issue, sometimes quite thoroughly, but without offering strong ‘solutions’;
. . . or even outright disparaged the work of translation in language documentation.
◦ Lest you think I am being hyperbolic, let me share with you a quote that explicitly articulates an attitude which underlay a number of resources that I consulted. In her chapter
on ‘Linguistic Annotation’ in Gippert et. al.’s (2006) Essentials of Language Documentation,
Eva Schultze-Berndt wrote the following about free translation:
Translation is a skill (many will say, an art) which, if undertaken to professional
standard, usually requires a lot of training, and is fraught with methodological
problems. It seems highly unrealistic to burden documenters or annotators with
the expectation that they ought to provide translations that meet the standards of
professional literary or scientific translation. This is all the more so as the translation is often undertaken by someone who is not a member of the speech community
and, moreover, is only just beginning to learn the language to be documented and
to understand its structure as well as its cultural background. In addition, often a
documenting linguist will translate into a language which is not his or her native
language. . . Therefore, all users and potential users of language documentations
should be discouraged in the strongest possible terms from using the free translations which are provided as part of the annotation as more than a clue to the
meaning and analysis of the documented utterances. (p. 234)2
◦ My immediate and strong reaction to this quote was, “OK, I’ll wait here while you go ‘discourage’ ‘the users and potential users’ in the heritage language community ‘in the strongest
possible terms’.”
◦ The facts that translation requires “a lot of training” and “is fraught with methodological problems” are not justification, in my mind, for not providing/obtaining some good basic training
in relevant aspects of translation theory and in field-tested methodologies for producing good
free translations of the rich material that it is our charge to document.
◦ And yet, in both the 545-page Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork, (Thieberger 2012)
and the 340-page book Language Documentation: Practice and Values (Genoble and Furbee
2010), the word ‘translation’ doesn’t even have an entry in the index!
◦ Many of the resources on language documentation and fieldwork that I have surveyed so far
(and there are a number more that I have yet to scour) that do mention or discuss translation
work take it as a matter of fact – that is, work that must and will be done; but they provide
no, or minimal, theory and methodological guidance for producing skillful translations (for
example, Bowern 2008).
◦ Also in Gippert et. al.’s Essentials of Language Documentation, Bruna Franchetto provides
a thoughtful and helpful, if brief, discussion of the role and importance of translation in
language documentation in her chapter on ‘Ethnography in language documentation’. She
2
Thereafter, she provides four pages of commentary on a few of the issues one may encounter in the work of
translation.
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states that translation “must be understood in the widest possible sense, ranging from kinds
of transcription and annotation. . . to translation properly speaking, working from a sourcelanguage to a target language.” (Franchetto 2006: 185). She points to what she considers a
“vast literature” on translation found primarily in “the areas of literary criticism and poetic
theory” and refers us to Swann (1992), Rubel and Rosman (2003) and Bringhurst (1999) as
“useful starting points” for language documentation purposes. In addition, for foundational
approaches to the representation of verbal art forms, she refers us to Hymes (1977, 1992),
Sherzer (1990), and Tedlock (1983).
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What is a “good translation”?
If we are going to attend to creating ‘good translations’ of endangered language materials, what
might that mean, in concrete, practical terms? In brief, these are my basic criteria for a “good free
translation” of a text, ordered roughly by increasing complexity:
◦ A good translation attains a high level of ‘faithfulness’ between the source language and the
target language(s); everything that is present in the source language is present or conveyed in
the target language(s), and nothing more.
. . . is designed for and appropriate to a specific target audience, based on their particular interests and priorities. The audience may be broad or it may be specialized, but it must be
conceptualized and targeted.
. . . handles disfluencies in the original recording in a skillful, and perhaps even illuminating way.
. . . is richly and imaginatively annotated and footnoted, with a strong Translators’ Note or Translator’s Introduction that provides ample contextualizing and clarifying information.
. . . conveys the elements of fluency, fluidity, style, coherence, and artistry that are present in the
original ‘performance’ of the text, to the greatest degree possible.
◦ In the same chapter mentioned above, Bruna Franchetto characterizes a “good translation”
as “trustworthy” (herself echoing Malinowski) and “competent, something only made possible
by allying linguistic and ethnographic knowledge”; one which respects “the meanings carried
by the “source” language. . . thereby respecting its speakers.” (Franchetto 2006: 185)
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Common attitudes and (false) assumptions
Recognizing the minimal disciplinary discussion of translation theories and methods among documentary linguists and language documentarians, I would like to articulate (perhaps sometimes
provocatively) a number of attitudes toward, and (false) assumptions about, translation that I
have heard or seen articulated in sometimes explicit, sometimes subtle, ways over the last 20 years:
◦ “We just need to produce one version of a given text, as quickly as possible, so that we can
get on to the ‘real’ work of linguistic analysis.”
. . . and that one version will, and must, be lean, monologic, dense, error-free, and a definitive
representation of the source recording, so that we don’t have to think about it anymore.
◦ “As long as I gloss the words right, I’ve done my job.”
◦ “Free translation doesn’t matter anyway, as long as you have interlinear glosses.”
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→ Put another way, sometimes the realm of ‘language’ that we work to document is unwittingly limited by a basically “structuralist notion of a language as a system of rules and
oppositions” (Himmelman 2006:20) and as a result our default mode is to think and work
as though the sentence is the largest unit of meaning that we need to explore when we
translate texts.
◦ “It is easy to translate between languages as long as you and/or the author is/are bilingual;
it’s just like talking combined with taking dictation.”
◦ “I am a transparent, passive conduit between the source language and the target language;
the author of the source language text is the best and only acceptable author for the target
language translation, and must have the final, immutable word on all free translations.”
◦ “The cultural, historical, political, etc. contexts of texts are just too complicated and confusing
to document well. (So I’m going to ignore them.)”
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Real and substantial challenges
Having spent some time arguing for greater sensitivity to and commitment among us to take on the
work of ‘good translation’, (and especially good free translation in the context of verbally artistic
texts), it is appropriate now to face head on some of the real and substantial challenges that we
must engage with, both in our theories and in our practice of endangered language translation
work:
◦ Challenge: I may lack fluency in the source language and culture in which the text is embedded.
In fact, when I begin a new documentation project with new people in a new place, no
matter how experienced I am in other contexts, I am necessarily ignorant to many of the
salient aspects of local life and language.
→ Strategy: This ignorance is not irremediable. If I can be intensely attentive to detail,
self-reflexive, humble, and porous to learning, I can reduce my ignorance steadily over
time.
◦ Challenge: We may lack fluency in the target language (and culture) as well.
→ Strategy: Again, with time and effort, our fluency will improve.
◦ Challenge: The author may lack fluency in the target language.
→ Strategy: In such circumstances, we can seek out and pull together additional resources
and collaborators to create a ‘good translation’ by local standards.
◦ Challenge: While working with difficult source material, the author may wish to retell or
rewrite the text, rather than work patiently through a close transcription and translation,
making ‘faithfulness’ among the representation and the translation of the text, and the source
recording, extremely difficult to achieve.
→ Strategies: In such cases, we can provide alternate written versions – one more faithful
to the recording, the other honoring the author’s revisions. We can also work with difficult material on multiple occasions, negotiate with patience, and consult multiple fluent
speakers, until a satisfactory outcome is obtained.
◦ Challenge: My time is always limited and full; how much time can I really afford to allot
to the subtleties of translation? How many versions of a single text can I really commit to
producing?
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→ Strategy: Large-scale project planning and smaller-scale time allocation boil down to
our individual strengths, interests, and commitments, so only you can come up with
appropriate answers to these questions – recognizing that your answers may change as
your work evolves.
→ My argument here is that our plans and commitments can be better made
if they rest upon better disciplinarily-grounded theories and methods for our
inevitable translation work.
◦ Challenge: This aspect of language documentation work is under-valued, even disparaged, in
our field, so it is counter-cultural and professionally risky to prioritize ‘good translations’ and
concommitantly dedicate the time and resources necessary to produce artfully transcribed and
translated text artifacts (and/or to engage with the theories that produce ‘good’ translations).
→ Strategy: Language documentation itself has been disparaged by linguists (and anthropologists), especially of prior generations. The path forward has been to make a case for
why this work is important to our larger shared goals; and to improve its standing, along
with its own theories and methods, through doing it. The same holds for translation work
within language documentation.
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A Concrete Example: K´
eiiku
Having talked at length about various issues surrounding the work of translation in endangered
language text work, I would like to look at a concrete example of a text transcribed and translated
by members of the ILDP team. The text, K´eiiku, is a short dream narrative told by †Ligia Inuma
Inuma and recorded in 2008. The recording and the relevant transcription/translation are available
at: www.cabeceras.org/ildp products.htm
It is crucial to underscore the fact that the original transcription and translation that I worked
with were produced in the context of a dissertation, with specific goals in mind. I have approached
it anew with different goals, and a different audience in mind. No disrespect is intended toward
the linguist who produced the original version.
I chose to use this particular text for this talk because it demonstrates a number of important issues, including the following, which are footnoted in the second and third versions in the
accompanying text artifact:
◦ At various points, it lacks full correspondence between the ‘source language’ (SL) and the
‘target language (TL)’; and there are no notes explaining these additions and subtractions of
material.
◦ There is ambiguity between possible senses of single words.
◦ There is insufficient contextualizing information for a non-local audience (for example, no
Translators Note and essentially no footnotes).
◦ Both the style of speaking and the articulation of the author are unusual in many spots, which
means that a non-expert would have a very hard time recovering both form and content at
some future time.
◦ It shows the importance of providing a clear and detailed free translation in order to substantiate the inclusion of fast speech material that is impossible to recover from the recording
alone.
◦ It includes several nice examples of the San Antonio variety of Loreto Spanish.
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◦ And, regrettably, the author has already died, which means certain information is now unrecoverable, so we have to do the best we can by other means.
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Concrete strategies for improving the quality of our translations
◦ Immediately after recording a text in the source language, I can ask for and record a retelling
in a target language(s).
◦ Later, I can obtain a free translation of the text from the author (or another fluent speaker)
while playing back the original recording.3
◦ Meanwhile, I can learn as much as possible about the text, its context, and its most salient
features (key concepts, characters, places, events, times, etc). I can discuss the text and these
other aspects not only with the author but also with other fluent and knowledgeable members
of the heritage community.
◦ Likewise, I can familiarize myself with as many existing resources as possible that provide
necessary context, insights, and models for creating my translation (for example, other text
recordings and translations from the same or a closely related language, if these exist; ethnographies, collections from other languages that have the qualities you desire, etc.)
◦ I can record (and archive) my discussion sessions with the author (and others) to clarify key
points of the text and its context.
◦ I can work through the original, line by line, or even word-by-word, with the author – and
with other consultants as well in tricky spots – as many times as necessary to provide the best
possible translation under current conditions.
◦ I can work through my transcriptions and translations on multiple distinct occasions, knowing
that my understanding will blossom as I deepen my familiarity with the bigger picture of a
text.
◦ After I think I have a good result, I can set the work aside for a week or two, so that I am
able to return to it with fresh eyes and a clear mind.
◦ After I think I have a good result, I can work through my translation with other linguists and
collaborators, in order to benefit from their distinct perspectives and areas of expertise.
◦ I can ask clear and detailed questions about any aspect of the text that is unfamiliar to me,
without being embarrassed to acknowledge my ignorance. (Over and over again, I have seen
my fellow humans feign knowledge to save face with their interlocutors, and of course I do it
sometimes too. Alas, especially in the context of our research, this does us and everyone else
a great disservice in the bigger picture.)
◦ I can resolve my confusions regarding inconsistent or unstable translations of certain words
or concepts by probing them on other types of occasions and in different contexts. This kind
of ‘sneak attack’ can be an excellent strategy for pinpointing the salient distinctions between
similar concepts.
◦ When I realize that I thought something in the source language ‘meant’ something other than
the gloss or translation given by a native speaker, I can ask how exactly my previous interpretation is wrong. (For example, “Hey, I thought that was a gavagai, so what is the difference
between that and a gavagai ?”) This too can draw out salient contrasts and differences between
3
Woodbury (2007) calls this a ‘U.N.-style translation’.
10
similar concepts. Similarly, by asking subtle and careful questions I can actually improve my
collaborators’ estimation of my competence and willingness to learn well.
◦ In general, I can be systematic and patient.
◦ I can prepared, in terms of both attitude and resource allotment, to produce more than one
version of a (at least a sub-set of) the text corpus, because I recognize that the interests and
desires of linguists are not the same as those of the heritage language community.
◦ Knowing that an untranslated text is essentially useless, I won’t let my perfectionism get in
the way of my progress toward producing a good translation.
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Thick translation
◦ Conceptually, as well as procedurally, we can also aim to produce a ‘thick translation’ in the
sense described by Tony Woodbury.
◦ In his 2007 paper On thick translation in linguistic documentation, Woodbury uses Evans
and Sasse’s (2006) paper as a point of departure for recommending “thick translation” of
indigenous language texts, which he characterizes as “documenting textual meaning in such a
way as to offer maximum transparency to those who may interpret the records we make in a
context highly different from that in which we ourselves work: the ‘philologist 500 years from
now’. . . . My basic [principle] is that to do this best, the documentary record must show not
one ‘finished’ translation, but as many tacks into the translation of an original language entity
as can be documented, each representing a certain theory of inter-language correspondence.”
(Woodbury 2007: 120)
◦ He states that thick description “involves at least the following curatable artefacts:”
Audio recordings of real-time oral free translations
Word-by-word and sentence by sentence translations by an original-language speaker
(written or represented in field notes or on tape)
Linguists’ morphosyntactic parses, with invariant glosses for minimal elements
Linguists’ compositional renditions of parses
Drafts of (ever-more) refined literary translations by source-language speaker, targetlanguage speaker, or a collaboration of both
Formal poetic analyses of the original that were factored into translations
Alternative versions of the same text
Literary exegeses, discussions, footnotes, hypertext (written, or in notes or tapes of interactions leading to any of the above)
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Concluding remarks
◦ At the most basic level, (and as is sometimes said with despair inside old archives) endangered
language materials without some form of translation are (perhaps beautiful but) meaningless
shapes and sounds. Ergo, we are all operating from some default “theory” of translation,
whether we are consciously aware of it or not.
◦ Doesn’t it make sense, then, to include an examination of our default theories of translation
in our profession – both in our training, and in our practice – and to engage those default
theories via more explicit and fine-tuned ones? From there, we can much more effectively
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design and implement our strategies and methods for meeting our own professed goals as
language documentarians.
◦ To do good translations that do justice to the unique character, style, and artistry of the
original text takes time and focused effort. If this is important, then we must make the time,
and make the effort, to produce good, even excellent, translations.
◦ Excellent translation, whether it is an ‘art’ or not, rests upon some solid, learnable principles
and skills, which can be ever improved through practice. So again, if this is important to us,
we must acquire those skills and practice, practice, practice.
◦ The bibliography below offers various useful starting points if you wish to engage more with
the science, craft, and art of translation in the context of your own language documentation
work.
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Bibliography
Baker, Mona. 2011. In Other Words: A coursebook on translation. Second edition. Routledge.
Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. 1991. Translation Studies. Revised edition. Routledge.
Bowern, Claire. 2008. Linguistic fieldwork. Palgrave Macmillan.
Bringhurst, Robert. 1999. A Story as Sharp as a Knife. University of Nebraska Press.
Franchetto, Bruna. 2006. Ethnography in language documentation. In Jost Gippert, Nikolaus
P. Himmelman, and Ulrike Mosel (eds.), Essentials of Language Documentation. Mouton
de Gruyter. pp. 183-211.
Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus P. Himmelman, and Ulrike Mosel (eds.), Essentials of Language Documentation. Mouton de Gruyter.
Grenoble, Lenore A and N. Louanna Furbee (Editors). 2010. Language Documentation: Practice
and Values. John Benjamins.
Himmelman, Nikolaus P. 1998. Documentary and descriptive linguistics. Linguistics 36: 166.
Berlin: de Gruyter.
— 2006. Language Documentation: What is it and what is it good for? In Jost Gippert, Nikolaus
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